THE RETURN OF POT
Opening day at San Francisco's Cannabis Cultivators Club, and the line at
the door eats up the whole block. It is a well-mannered line, considering
who is standing in it: a bunch of homeless men streaked with grime, a very
large and fierce-looking woman in a wheelchair, a gaggle of mulatto
transvestites. Near the front of the line, a woman with pronounced buck
teeth is straining, with slow and deliberate jabs, to place a feather
earring in the ear of the man standing in front of her, a difficult task
given that the man has no ear, merely a gnarled nub of cartilage. She
giggles; Van Gogh smiles. A tall, gaunt man guards the door. He checks to
see that each person has a letter of diagnosis from a doctor, legally
qualifying him or her to buy marijuana. The gatekeeper is calm, composed,
and so are the men and women that file silently past him. There is a sense
about the scene of something captured in negative. It is as if the rotting
of late '60s San Francisco described by Joan Didion in Slouching Towards
Bethlehem has been preserved in reverse; the characters are the same, but
the center was holding.

Inside the club, order seems to reign, as well. The computers are up, the
phones are ringing. Reporters chase down sick people in wheelchairs. The
reporters are here because today is a news event: the relaunching of the
mothership, as the club is known to its grateful patients, marks the coming
out of California's medical marijuana movement after years in hiding.
Founded in 1992, the club existed in an uneasy truce with the city of San
Francisco, selling pot to some 12,000 customers designated as medical
patients. It grew to become by far the largest medical marijuana club in
the state, serving as many patients in a day as the other seven or so clubs
together might serve in a week. Then, in August, 1996, state narcotics
agents raided the club and shut it down on a host of marijuana possession
and distribution charges. Three months later, California voters, by a
margin of 56 to 44 percent, passed Proposition 215: The Medical Marijuana
Initiative, making it legal to smoke marijuana in California with the
approval or recommendation of a doctor. A local judge promptly gave the
club permission to reopen and designated the club's owner, a former (and
often-convicted) marijuana dealer named Dennis Peron, as a caregiver (which
is to say, pot provider) for up to 12,000 patients.

Today is the first day of the new era, and Peron is eager to make a good,
caregiving sort of impression. Dressed in an argyle sweater and blue oxford
with a pinstriped tie, he glides to the middle of the room, climbs up on a
coffee table ringed with doting patients and speaks: "If we can't get in
touch with your doctor we can't sell you marijuana. We are law makers, not
law breakers." He then adds, with a mixture of melodrama and mock asides,
"We will never abandon you. We will save the people in pain. Once you get
your card, you will see the marijuana smoke. Just like the old days. Oh,
that smell...."

A*cynical listener might discern here an attitude that seems less like that
of the nurturing caregiver, and more like that of, how to put it, an old
pothead eager for the good times to roll again. The cynical listener would
be on to something. Late in the afternoon, when all the reporters have
cleared out to meet their daily deadline, Peron hushes the crowd again. "I
know a lot of you have waited a long time and you are sick and you have to
go through this bullshit. And it is bullshit. Today we have to go through
this bullshit for a thousand years of love. I've missed you so much. One
week of bullshit, a thousand years of love." One of Peron's deputies rushes
outside to carry the message to those who did not make it in that day.
"Don't worry," he eases them. "It will be just like before. Just come back
tomorrow. Today is the first day so things are a little, you know. Just
come back tomorrow."

The passage of Proposition 215 surprised even its most zealous supporters.
In the months before the November election, they fought what they thought
was an uphill battle against an enemy that tried to portray them as a front
for the seedy drug dealers on Market Street. Tough-talking law enforcement
officers like Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates warned that the initiative
"would legalize marijuana, period!" But the pro-215 activists knew better
than to engage in that argument. They stuck to their line: the referendum
was simply about limited, medical use of the drug, and then only in extreme
cases. They made the debate one of compassion versus suffering, plastering
billboards across the state with images of the hollow-faced sick and dying,
the bloated and bald Helen Reading, 43, breast cancer; the furrowed and
frowning Thomas Carter, 47, epilepsy. "you have just been told you have
terminal cancer," reads one poster. "now for the bad news: your medicine is
illegal."

Of equal importance in their electoral victory, the pro-215 activists
tailored their image midstream; they hired a pinstriped professional, Bill
Zimmerman, to run the campaign, and to run it at a conspicuous distance
from people like Dennis Peron: "He was pictured on election night smoking a
joint and saying, `Let's all get stoned and watch election night returns,'"
Zimmerman recalls. "That kind of behavior supports the opponents' view that
we are a stalking horse for legalization.... He could ruin it for the truly
sick." Zimmerman's images stuck. The New York Times ran a sympathetic
portrait of "an arthritic, HIV-positive cabaret performer," under the
headline "marijuana club helps those in pain." Sympathetic, and gullible.
With its breathy, tenderhearted reporting, the intrepid Times reporters
implicitly tried to correct Sheriff Gates. See, the article said, these
people smoking these joints are cripples, real ones, and cancer patients,
real ones. They are merely looking for a little easing of their pain, not
fronting for the de facto legalization of pot.

The truth about the medical marijuana movement is much simpler, and
blindingly obvious after a day in Peron's club. The movement is about the
compassionate extension of relief to sick people--THC, the active
ingredient in marijuana, offers some sick people a cheap, effective
surcease from pain--but it is also very much, and primarily, about
legalization. The movement may feature billboards of the infirm, but in the
offices of its activists you are more likely to find a different poster, a
stoner classic: the declaration of independence and the u.s. constitution
were written on hemp paper.

Both the hemp poster and the sad faces of Helen Reading and Thomas Carter
are, in different ways, part of an overall campaign to make pot
wholesome--to turn it into something as legitimate as, say,
over-the-counter cough syrup. The medical marijuana movement and the
legalization movement share a common language and common idea. Most of the
medical marijuana clubs that have sprung up in California in the past seven
years are much stricter than Peron's, which represents the outside edge of
respectability and adherence to the law. These more proper establishments
run would-be clientele through the checklist of rigid protocols a patient
must submit to--a signed doctor's recommendation, a detailed health
questionnaire, follow-up visits to the doctor. But, if you talk to the
people who run the clubs for any time at all, you will notice that mostly
what they talk about is not medicine but legalization--the same standard
jargon of hemp and drug wars and government oppression and narcs. One of
the strictest clubs in the state is in Oakland, a small place run by a
righteous young man named Jeff Jones, who is rigorous in following the
letter of the law. The law says, basically, that marijuana may only be sold
to people who have a legitimate medical need for it--people, in other
words, who could be made to feel better by a toke or two. "But wouldn't
marijuana make anyone feel better?" I asked Jones. "Now you're getting the
point," he answered, approvingly.

Legitimation through medicalization is not a novel tactic in drug history.
In their times and places, opium, laudanum, cocaine, nicotine, alcohol and
LSD have been packaged as cures. At the turn of the century, middle-class
medicine cabinets were stocked with doses of morphine, codeine and
laudanum. The tincture of opium in spirits was known as "God's own
medicine." Fussy baby? Try Children's Comfort, or Mrs. Godfrey's soothing
syrup, a healthy shot of opium in wine. Public health officials estimated
at the time that one in every 200 Americans was a drug addict, most of them
happy (giddy, even) housewives. And now, we have pot, the medicine.

The medicalization of marijuana is an attempt to recapture something lost,
the brief moment of status pot enjoyed in the 1970s. It is hard to recall
now how very near it seemed marijuana was to national legalization then.
That year, a government lawyer named Keith Stroup launched the first
serious effort to mainstream pot, a group called, aptly, norml--the
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. With his charming
lisp and velvet bowtie, Stroup succeeded in making marijuana normal, even
banal, a trajectory wonderfully documented in Dan Baum's Smoke and Mirrors.
Within two years, Stroup had convinced eleven states to make marijuana
possession the legal equivalent of a parking violation. School drug abuse
books "dismissed marijuana as less harmful than tobacco," writes Baum; "one
advised kids to use a water pipe to cool the smoke and avoid burning holes
in their clothing."

Then Jimmy Carter picked a drug czar, Peter Bourne, who was the Beltway
version of Timothy Leary. Bourne convinced Carter to take the first crucial
step toward legalization--replacing criminal penalties with civil ones. The
president announced his decision in a speech; every sentence on drugs was
written by Keith Stroup. "I support legislation ... to eliminate all
federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of
marijuana," Carter announced.

The end came suddenly, crashingly, with Ronald Reagan. The new president
picked up Nixon's War on Drugs and added the force of the U.S. Army, the
FBI and the CIA. His wife warned parents to "Get Involved," their kids to
"Just Say No." The new official drug abuse pamphlet called Parents, Peers &
Pot asked, "Is your child keeping late hours? Has his schoolwork suddenly
gone bad? [D]oes she look sloppy or dirty?" and blamed this teenage
epidemic of sloth and bad hygiene on marijuana. "The mood toward drugs is
changing in this country, and the momentum is with us," Reagan thundered in
a radio address. "Drugs are bad, and we're going after them." The culture
retreated, with a large dose of self-flagellation. For years, the prophets
of marijuana lay holed up in dim, seedy head shops, muttering about the
narcs. But now, once again, California is sending them a signal.

The excitement of a new dawn is felt on this opening day of the club, and
it is hardly dampened by the dim, fusty interior. The place is divided into
three spacious, though windowless, rooms and looks like the messy common
room of a college dorm, with bits of origami and amateur "art" hanging from
the ceiling, mismatched couches placed askew, ranging in color from bruised
to rust to dung. The first person I run into is Andrew, a middle-aged black
man with clipped dreads. "You're a journalist," he observes, when he sees
me taking notes. "I keep a journal." Having established this common bond,
he feels comfortable showing me some of his work. "Before I started
writing, life wasn't worth two puffs of coke," he explains as a prologue. I
expect to see some more revelations in the journal, maybe some bad poetry.
But all I can make out on the first page is "shorts suck" with a crude
drawing of Andrew in boxer shorts.

I try to change the subject, and ask him why he's here. He suffers from a
disease not mentioned in the posters, but which turns out to be a
relatively common ailment among the club's patients. "I have insomnia," he
explains. "Also, I get migraine headaches." Before I can ask Andrew's last
name, my arm is grabbed from behind by a woman I soon find out is Pebbles
Trippet, a Berkeley activist who wants me to listen to an on-camera
interview she's doing with the TV equivalent of High Times.

Pebbles is a woman who once was conventionally lovely, with clear blue
eyes, a straight nose and long blond hair. She has preserved these features
of young beauty--the eyes, the long hair--but added a layer of must and
cobwebs and wrinkles. She is draped in what looks like an old rug with
pockets, a tattered rainbow lei, cracked leather sandals and mismatched
socks. The effect is jarring, like a skeleton with pretty hair. "I am a
medical marijuana user," she declares to the camera. "I have self-medicated
for decades. They have tried to jail me in three cities--Contra Costa
County, Sonoma County, Marin County."

I ask her what's wrong, trying to sound sympathetic.
"I get migraine headaches."

How does smoking marijuana help?

"I use it as prevention. I have not had my weekly headache since childhood.
It has to be really good bud, and it relaxes me. It takes me to a higher
spiritual place. It's part of my religious belief; it's a sacrament. Herbs
and humans need each other. I'm a nature worshiper, and I can sanction
anyone who uses Mother Nature's herb."

Pebbles introduces me to her friend Buzzy Linhart, a roly-poly, balding man
with stiff whiskers the color of straw. Buzzy is wearing an eye patch. "If
not for marijuana, Buzzy might well be blind," says Pebbles.

I ask Buzzy if I can see his doctor's note.

"I have to update my doctor's letter. I gotta go back to Berkeley and see
if he's, uhhh, in the country."

Pebbles presses him, "Tell them about your disease."

At this point Buzzy launches into a dialogue I have great difficulty
following: "I found my old pal marijuana saved my life ... the love herb
... gather the earth back together ... Reagan ... prostitution laws."
Suddenly, he says, "This is important. Write this down," giving me hope I
will get something useful. "Do you know who was the co-author of Bette
Midler's `Got to Have Friends'?"
Uh, no.

"Buzzy was the co-author. Tonight, she's opening in Las Vegas. People like
her should not forget the people who launched their career."

I make a mental note. Buzzy and Pebbles have taught me an important lesson.
People who get high are very difficult to interview, for several reasons:
(1) They can't complete a thought. They speak in strings of non-sequiturs;
they dig for socially heavy meaning but can only come up with verbal
scraps-- snatches of movement jargon from the summer of love, stoner
observations overheard in the parking lots at Dead shows, stray dialogue
from "Gilligan's Island." (2) They are paranoid. During our interview,
Pebbles often strays out of the camera's range to stand very close to me
and look at my notes. This is distracting because I do not want her to see,
say, my description of her outfit. I resolve to write in very small
letters. It is also distracting because it affords me an uncomfortably
close view of her teeth, the kind of teeth I will see many more of in the
days to come--brown and rotted with smoke, the color of dead flowers, and
covered by a slimy film.
I decide to move on, determined to find out how the process works, how one
gets a doctor to write a note and then procures a coveted membership card
from the club. I move to the back room. Everyone here is smoking, although
smoking is forbidden on the first floor, and none of them has a membership
card yet. I sit down next to Lily White and Billy Swain, two friends who
met at the club three years ago. Lily says she has eye problems and
sciatica, a pain in her leg and thigh. I ask how she got her doctor's note:
"I asked my doctor to prescribe marijuana. He didn't want to do it. But all
he needs to know is that I need it. I'm the patient. The doctors should
know it's our life, it's in our hands, not the doctor's hands. Why, are you
thinking about becoming a patient?"

I tell her I have no serious problems.

"The majority of people are facing something, anxiety or depression," she
comforts. "You know what problems you got. Even if you just want to hang
out. You got to approach it as honest as you can. Do you like what you see,
or don't you?" Billy Swain agrees: "It's not so much that you have to get
your doctor's permission. They have to say yes to you. The doctors should
cater to you. You have to figure out if you're bored, if you need a social
outlet. This is a happy place; there's a lot of hugging." A burly
ponytailed man named Fred Martin joins the group. "Can I have a toke?" he
asks Lily, and a toke is offered. A former Hell's Angel, Martin lost the
bottom half of his right leg in a motorcycle accident. Now he works as a
professional activist, usually across the street from the White House,
where he yells at President Clinton as he jogs by, "Hey, I'll inhale for
you." Fred offers his opinion on how I can join the club. "You women have a
way of persuasion," he says, grinning, so I can admire his fine, mossy
brown teeth. He picks up a pamphlet called Medical Marijuana: Know Your
Rights put out by Peron, and reads it aloud: "`Talk with your doctor.
Marijuana has been shown to: aid in stress management.' Don't you ever get
stressed out?" he asks me. I look at him blankly, and he takes advantage of
the silence to launch into the pot speech, something about Thomas Jefferson
getting high, the Constitution on hemp paper, the War of 1812, Nancy Drew ....

At this point I had to stop. Total objectivity is a futile goal for all
reporters, I realize. But there are times when personal circumstances so
intrude on a reporter's judgment that they must be revealed. In this case,
it could be that I have a boyfriend who drives me mad with his marijuana
ravings, or that my uncle eased his cancer pains with marijuana, or that
Dennis Peron is my best friend. As it happens, none of those things is
true. What this reporter must admit is that at this point, I was very, very
high. I had been sitting in this back room for quite some time and a cloud
of smoke had risen level with my nose, giving me an acute case of contact
high. I was not exactly hallucinating, but it seemed to me that everyone
had stopped what they were doing and were staring at me. That Billy, Lily,
Fred, even Van Gogh, were watching to see what I would do next. I decided
it was time to go.

The next morning I returned to meet Dennis Peron. His office is behind a
bolted door with no door knob, in a corner of the building. Inside is the
combination of seedy and healthy living peculiar to California
hippies--bits of weed and papers strewn about the stained carpet, alongside
organic kemp meal and bottles of Arrowhead spring water. Dennis is like
that, too, tanned but wrinkled, a wiry face and neatly combed white hair. I
ask him why he started the club, and he begins, instantly, as if a switch
had been thrown, to spin a heart-wrenching tale: "The club is a eulogy to
my young lover Jonathan, who died of aids. We were lovers for seven years,
and I miss him every day of my life. He died a very painful death. He had
KS lesions all over his face, and we would go to a restaurant and people
would move away from him. I always dreamed of a place Jonathan could go and
smoke pot and meet people with aids and not feel such stigma. It started
out as a eulogy and has turned into a mission of mercy for the most
powerless and gentle members of society."
The story is completely rehearsed, emotionless. As he tells it, Peron flips
through Post-it notes on his calendar, stops to shout to his coworkers to
find out when his next radio interview is. It is only when I ask him who is
responsible for Proposition 215 that I get his attention. "Me. You're
looking at the guy. I am not an egomaniac, but it was my pain that changed
the nation. My loss inspired me to do something for this country."

Like most tearjerker myths, Peron's leaves a few things out. Such as the
fact that he was a notorious San Francisco drug dealer for decades before
he started the club; he ran the Big Top supermarket, a one-stop drug
emporium, and the Island Restaurant, which served pot upstairs and food
downstairs, and was in and out of jail several times.

Later, when I tell Zimmerman about Peron's version of the story, he laughs
for a good ten seconds before he explains Peron's role. "After two months
it became clear that Dennis was going to fail miserably, that he wasn't
keeping up with projections." They needed 800,000 signatures in five months
to qualify the proposition, and Peron only had a few thousand. "By the time
we were finished he had provided less than 10 percent of the signatures.
There is no limit to that man's ego."

Peron does seem to be driven by an egotist's perverse, almost pathological
need to shock. He believes he is infallible. He believes, actually, that he
is literally a saint. He says things with no regard to the consequences, or
perhaps too much regard. The most famous example is a quote he gave to The
New York Times last year, a quote that was folded into the opponents'
commercials, and cost Zimmerman countless hours of damage control: "I
believe all marijuana use is medical--except for kids," he said. I ask
Peron now if he regrets that quote. He stands up and glares at me. "no way
do I regret it," he shouts. "I believe 90 percent to 100 percent of
marijuana use is medical."

Needless to say, this attitude makes Peron's medical judgments less than
scientific. He seems to judge medical need haphazardly; his only guiding
principle is deference to the patient. For example, drug czar Barry
McCaffrey, in his hostile December press conference, held up a chart he
attributed to an ally of Peron's listing the medical uses of marijuana,
including such dubious ailments as writer's cramp, aphrodisiac and
recovering lost memories. "Aphrodisiac, that's ridiculous," Peron says,
recalling the list. "They are just so uptight they had to throw in some
sexual thing." What about the lost memories? "That's all right with me.
Some people have demons, and they have to chase them away."

Narcotics agents busted him in August precisely for this laxness; among
other things, they sent in an undercover female agent with a diagnosis of a
yeast infection, and Peron sold her marijuana. He still does not understand
why that's a problem. "I said to her, `I'm kind of embarrassed, this is a
woman's thing, but maybe it helps the itching.' I'm not going to second
guess a woman. I'd be putting down every woman in the world if I denied her
medicine."

By the end of our talk, I have a better understanding of the process,
although I'm not sure I have more faith in it. Peron is more careful than
he used to be, more out of concern for narcs than for his patients. At his
press conference, McCaffrey threatened to prosecute doctors who recommend
the drug. This threat has ironically provided Peron with an easy excuse.
"Everybody's being tricky," Peron says. "It's a semantic game forced on us
by the federal government." The club operators ask only the minimum level
of cooperation from the doctors: they check that the doctor is registered
with the state licensing board, call the doctor, identify the club and
check that the letter of diagnosis is real. Only if the doctor voices an
objection will they deny the patient a membership card. It's an excuse, but
not a great one. The other clubs still require a signed recommendation from
the doctor. They also check with the doctor every six months or so to see
that the diagnosis is still valid. Once a patient has a membership card
from Peron's club, he has it forever.

The doctors who cooperate fall into three main categories. (1) Serious
illness doctors. In cases of aids, cancer, glaucoma and epilepsy, there is
substantial anecdotal evidence, although no thorough scientific research,
that marijuana helps. For aids patients, it stimulates appetite; for
cancer, it eases nausea associated with chemotherapy; for glaucoma, it
relieves eye pressure; and, for epilepsy, it helps prevent seizures. (2)
True believers. There are a handful of doctors who believe in marijuana's
capacity to ease a myriad of symptoms. Most do independent research and
monitor their patients carefully. (3) The skeptical but convinceable. Here
is where the practice gets fishy.
Some doctors are wary of marijuana's effects, but willing to defer to their
patient's wishes.

Ironically, Proposition 215 permits them to cede control over marijuana
much more than they could over, say, allergy medicine. An allergy medicine
prescription has to be signed and numbered and tracked, with the number of
refills designated. Marijuana merely has to be approved, and an oral
approval will do. Dr. Barry Zevin runs the Tom Waddell Clinic in San
Francisco, serving the poor and underserved. He says hundreds of his
patients have asked him for letters of diagnosis to use at Peron's club. In
10 percent of the cases, mostly aids and cancer, he hands them over
confidently. In 10 percent he advises against it, such as when the patient
is severely psychotic. And for the rest he is not sure. But he will never
deny a patient, even a psychotic one, a letter of diagnosis, and he is not
sure he would ever make clear his objections. Because of his uncertainty,
Peron's laxness suits him: "I try to educate my patients. I say, `The last
thing in the world you need is marijuana. The last time you smoked it you
became psychotic.' But if they still want a letter, it's a dilemma.... I
prefer it to remain a gray area, where I don't need to make a decision."
Even if Zevin persists in objecting, he may be won over. "Knowing them,
they would have some advocacy," he says of the club operators. "They would
call and say, `Would you reconsider? We have some research that shows
marijuana helps hangnails, and I think this person ought to get it.' It's a
process of negotiation."

But the real future of the wholesome marijuana movement is not in the hands
of the sick; quite the opposite. People like Pebbles and Buzzy and, for
that matter, Dennis Peron, are what they seem to be, relics of the past. I
also met the future, and it was Starbucks. All over California, a new breed
of young entrepreneur is busy these days opening up a new kind of head
shop--excuse me, water pipe gallery--clean, safe, family-friendly places,
with track lighting, juice bars and cafe lattes. In these places, what used
to be known as a bong is now called art. And it costs as much.

In West Hollywood there is a street called Melrose that is determined not
to ever, ever, not even on its worst hair day, look anything like the
stretch of lower Market where Pebbles and Buzzy and Dennis get high. If
Melrose met lower Market in an alley, it would call for a cop. On Melrose,
trendy couture shops and MAC lipstick counters and retro diners ache for
the B-list kitsch stores in their midst to disappear. So the merchants of
Melrose must be thrilled by a store called Galaxy. With Galaxy, owner Russ
Ceres has managed to turn something cheesy into class. Galaxy is the new
wave of head shop, a place where smokers (ostensibly of tobacco) buy the
finest of paraphernalia in the most dignified of settings. Gone are the
Harley T-shirts, scorpion rings, fake silver chains; gone is the dimly lit
bong room in back. In their place is a fluorescent-lit studio space, juice
and coffee in front, water pipes displayed lovingly in glass cases, piece
by precious piece, each accompanied by an embossed placard bearing the
proud artist's name. Finally, bong pipes have reached equality with art,
something deserving a room of its own (and a little wall space, and good
lighting and maybe one day soon a show at the Whitney). "We are striving
for a new level of intelligence," explains Ceres. "We want to take the
Beavis and Butthead out of the image."

Ceres has a vision, and the core of his vision is bye-bye to Buzzy and
Pebbles. With his sandy hair and J. Crew good looks, Ceres is a 27-year-old
picture of healthy living, a younger, fitter version of Dennis Peron. "My
worst nightmare is a seedy hippie place with tie-dyes that attracts the
kind of crowd that crawls out of the woodwork," he explains. He pauses to
frown, briefly but sharply, at his Thai iced coffee. Too much milk. "We are
trying to upscale the atmosphere, to create more social acceptance for
smoking. This is a positive place, where lawyers and doctors can go and
wear nice clothes, like a cocktail lounge." He leads me over to the water
pipe display, to show off some of his finest pieces--a rose and teal
swirled eighteen-inch glass pipe, a twenty-one inch fashioned to look like
the human anatomy. "People who know nothing about smoking are amazed at the
artwork," he confides. "Sometimes they'll buy a piece just to display it on
their coffee table."

The amazing thing about Ceres's vision is the total absence of rebellion.
For those of you who suspected that the counterculture was really just a
mass, commercialized culture masked, Ceres is the culmination of your
theory. He does not reject middle-class norms, or even pretend to. In fact,
he embraces all the modes of mainstream life--money, status, power. In his
ideal America, marijuana would be anodyne, better than medicine. More like
one of those cheerful balms that help take a rough corner or two off
life--like a latte grande with skim, or a Disney theme park. It's not about
revolution and sensual experiment. It's about family values. Drug laws
bother him not because Big Brother is tying us down, but because "they
break up families. They prevent children from communicating with their
parents." In fact, his most cherished customer is "a 60-year-old man who
came in and looked at me sternly and said, `Son, it's about time a place
like this opened up. I'm tired of the tension this creates between
families.'" Perhaps it's because the man reminds him of his own father, a
white-collar vice president who, Ceres is pleased to report, "is very proud
of me. He thinks it's great."

Part of Ceres's plan is to promote young entrepreneurs like him, people
with a "sense of vision." One such person is the L.A. craftsman John Brown,
the hands behind the Homemade brand of handcrafted water pipes. Brown works
out of his parents' house in Brentwood, in a spotless room with hardwood
floors, rattan furniture and a fish pond out front. On the day we meet the
place hums with domestic tranquility, a lawn mower, a caged bird chirping
somewhere. Brown is of the surfer school, buzzed yellow hair, slouchy
jeans, says he's 21 but looks 16. He, too, began his business after a
personal encounter with hippie sloth. "My old partner was a great kid but a
real hippie. He followed the Dead shows and became real lazy and
irresponsible, living on the road, spending all our capital. I have nothing
against hippies, but I wouldn't want to work with one."

The experience seems to have left him with a bad taste for all things
natural. Despite the company's crafty name, Brown prefers only synthetics.
And he approaches his work with the enthusiasm Alexander Parkes must have
felt when he discovered the myriad uses of plastic. "I consider myself a
master of acrylics," he says, with deadpan pride. "I believe in the
durability of acrylics. I use only the highest-quality acrylics, and I've
experimented with the acrylics until it worked at perfection. I have made
the perfect pipe." He demonstrates, by dropping the pipe on the floor,
banging it on the table, showing how the stripes on the base look different
if you view them at different angles.

Like Ceres, Brown believes he is onto something much larger than water
pipes. "I got into it because of the age," he says, launching into
MTV-speak. "I can feel the energy around me, how important it is. It's not
a '60s thing anymore, it's not weed, it's not grass, it's the chronic. It's
got a new name, a new lifestyle. It didn't go away. It just became modern."

Modern lifestyles require modern comforts and modern designs, and lucky for
Brown and Ceres, they can find all they need, conveniently, in the new line
of hemp products. While Brown was perfecting his acrylics, a parallel
industry was sprouting nationwide to fill all his other worldly needs.
Displayed in full glory in Hemp Times, the upscale improvement on High
Times, the industry is dedicated to proving "an eco-friendly philosophy can
equal big money." This month's issue, for example, features an inside look
at the fashion show at Planet Hemp, New York's hemp megastore, where looks
range from "Evening Elegance" to "Campus Classics." There is some attempt
at a rebel yell--in one ad, a barefoot Keanu Reeves look-alike in an open
hemp shirt squints dangerously from a busy street, as an army of blue suits
passes him by. But mostly, the magazine is dedicated to proving you can
tune in, turn on and cash in. "America's hemp products industry doubles its
multimillion dollar grosses every year," the magazine's editors chirp.

There is hemp oil ("a `taste delicacy,' says Daniel Claret, one of North
America's premier gourmet chefs"), hemp plaid ("and stripes too!"), hemp
housewares and a hemp portfolio ("organize your life with hemp"). In the
Hemper's Bazaar, you can find all the latest hemp fashions; women in
bias-cut skirts cock their hips with Kate Moss haughtiness and tease each
other's hair to prepare for a night out in their spaghetti-strap Corona
hemp dresses. There are profiles of winning entrepreneurs, like Mitch and
Jill Cahn. "Fed up with the whole Wall Street thing," Mitch explains, they
turned to making hemp hats, and found they could "gross over two and a half
million."

When all the buzz has faded, there is something a little bleak about the
new pot atmosphere. Not that it might lead to legalization; that doesn't
much bother me. But the air of sanctimony; the puffing up of marijuana into
something more than it is. Jill and Mitch Cahn are annoying not because
they are hucksters, but because they insist on believing that they are
something more, that they're saving the earth by doling out hemp hats at
Phish concerts. In the end, a head shop is just a head shop. The woman
behind the counter at Galaxy looked as zoned out and faded as any bong
salesgirl I've seen; and as Ceres was showing off his display of art pipes,
one of his new intelligent clients was stealing my wallet.

For the sick, this blithe reverence for the herb seems especially grim. I
suppose if you are a terminal aids or cancer patient, smoking pot every
once in a while, even every day, can't hurt much. But knowing, even with
medical certainty, that THC stimulates the anandamide neurotransmitter says
nothing about what it does to your general well being. Pot may be medicine,
but getting high every day is still getting high every day. And it can't be
good for Dennis Peron's depressed stragglers and veterans on SSI to sit
around getting high every day.

Spend a few days hanging around Peron's club, and you can get awfully sad
at the pretense that all the wretched souls--the sick and the sick at
heart--can be fixed by a hug and a toke. "There, there," said one of the
nurses, stroking the arm of a woman who seemed hysterical and confused,
maybe even mildly retarded. "I have a great idea. Let's go upstairs and
have a smoke." It was a blind idolization I came to associate with
something I saw in Peron's office: a framed photo of a robust, blooming pot
plant propped up against an actual plant, withered and dying. My favorite
patient at Cannabis Cultivators was Miguel Ciena, a 42-year-old with bone
cancer, liver disease and aids. I liked Ciena because he was straight with
me about what he was doing. He searched for no rationalizations, either for
himself or the movement. He said he needed the medicine, but that he could
do without it. He offered that he'd been smoking pot for twenty-eight
years, long before he'd gotten sick. He didn't think it was too much to ask
for patients to get a real recommendation from a willing doctor. And he
thought the state was crazy to give Peron back his license after he'd
failed them so badly the first time. I liked him most because he
articulated what I had begun to feel: that human compassion was a
complicated thing, different from giving a hungry kitten some milk. "They
smile at you, but I wouldn't say they were caring," said Ciena. "Compassion
is telling it like it is."